A World First

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A momentous occasion, poorly documented. Today, Vickie became the first woman ever to dive in Lake Bonney! Unfortunately, I have no pictures of it. You’ll have to look at the Stone Aerospace blog for more details.
We sent her in to check out the progress of the melt hole, especially down at the bottom where it’s difficult for us to tell from the surface what’s going on. She whacked off a few chunks of the most problematic protrusions with an ice axe, and helped us note down what areas still need some work with the Hotsies.

Maciej flew back to town this morning to have his back checked, and the helo taking him out brought in his temporary replacement Lael. Tonight, he reported back that he’s just pulled a muscle and will have to take it easy for a week, but will be back tomorrow.

We also “fixed” the camera problem. That is, we tried to do the same thing as yesterday, but couldn’t replicate it. We played around with it for a while, but the problem didn’t reappear. We feel pretty confident that it was not actually a problem with the camera, but just an operator error or software “glitch.”

According to plan, tomorrow will be the first day that ENDURANCE goes swimming free. Slowly, but surely, we’re making progress towards doing actual missions.